This Month ...

  Many of us will be celebrating Easter this month, eating chocolate eggs, and getting together with family. But Easter is about a whole lot more ... learn about both the pagan and Christian origins of the holiday at Religious Tolerance.org.

  When I was growing up in Ireland, St. Patrick's Day was a religious holiday. We got the day off school, we pinned shamrocks on our collars, and attended mass and small local parades. We didn't paint our faces or wear  outrageous hats; we didn't  put green dye in anything.

   St. Patrick's Day is celebrated a little differently today, and especially in America! Learn about the history of the holiday at History.com.

Our Featured Author ... Garth Nix

Author Garth Nix was born in 1963 in Melbourne, Australia, but grew up in Canberra, where he went to University. Armed with a degree in professional writing, Nix has worked in a variety of jobs in the publishing industry, from sales representative and publicist, to editor and literary agent. He has been a full-time writer since 2002. Since the publication of Sabriel in 1995, his books have been published around the world and have been translated into 36 languages.

   When asked where he gets his ideas for his books, Nix says that he gathers material from "everything that goes on around me, from everything that I observe and experience, either directly or vicariously." He gets ideas from people's lives (his own included), as well as from "myth and legend; from landscape; from the living natural world; from the sciences; from all the fiction I’ve ever read."

   Currently, Nix lives in Sydney with his wife Anna and two sons, Thomas and Edward.

   Check out the author's website for a variety of info about his books, as well as interviews, his writing process, and much more. We have the Abhorsen trilogy in print and audio, as well as other books by Nix. Look for them on the shelves or in the library catalog today!